A review by travisclau
Gutshot by Amelia Gray

2.0

Immensely disappointed with this volume. I've heard so much about Gray's grotesque aesthetic and was looking forward to her outdoing Palahniuk's Haunted. To read reviews that describe her work as "a heart-shaker" or a "startling genre" of "exhilirating, creative" fiction seems extremely overstated. There is certainly macabre humor and fleshliness to her prose, and she has a particular knack for exploring the violence of human intimacy and perversity of domestic spaces. But I feel like most of the stories rely on a central gimmick (a grotesque turn of phrase, a disturbing event) to catch the reader off guard but ultimately stops there. "Visceral, fearless, and painfully true"? Sure. But is this work that actually challenges genre, form, and the intrinsic shock factor of the grotesque? I don't think so.